The Thoughts and Writing of Robert Wherry

2017 Spring April 17 Monday

Relatively warm walk this morning. A little bit of lightning, but very far away. Rain is forecast for a little later this morning.

Pace was 27 seconds slower than my goal, which was mildly disappointing since I thought I was walking faster than that. Maybe I am dressing too warm.

Didn’t cough at all which you won’t understand how good that felt unless you have had a chronic cough. As I noted previously, I don’t know if the cough stopping (for the first time in almost two years) is due to my more careful eating, the medicine I just started or if it is just time for it to stop.

Listening to “Algorithms for Real Life” (or close to that) during my morning walk. A rather interesting listen, at least so far.

He bought up the problem of “how to know when to stop looking and select” in real life.

One problem was if you are looking for a house or apartment. Assuming you “don’t have a second chance” (you have to take it or lose it when you see it), the problem becomes how do you know what you want if you haven’t looked?
I guess the question becomes when do you know you have enough knowledge to make an intelligent decision?

Of course you will never be sure, but Algorithmic thinking is that the answer is 37%. That is if you decide you will look at 10 houses or apartments, the 4th house is probably the optimal decision (that is, the 4th house you feel is “best so far”.

Ditto, if you have one month to find a house, 37% of 30, is the time to decide to select the “best so far” house.

They have also applied this to other decisions and the answer is 37% IF you can’t go back and select a house your rejected and you don’t have any other information.

If you can go back and select a previous house (or whatever) you rejected, the answer is 61%, you select the best house after you have viewed 61% of the houses or 61% of the time allotted for selecting a house.

Of course, this assumes that the house (or whatever) is still available.

While I am well aware of the problem with knowing the “right” moment to select something, I had never thought of a procedure for deciding “when” to take action, even if you don’t know it if is the right decision. I guess it is the “scared something better will come along” syndrome. If you make a decision, it may be too soon, if you keep waiting for something better, you never make a decision”.

I never thought of quantifying the decision. It may or may not make sense versus just using your “gut choice”, so to speak. Anyway, it promises to be an interesting book to listen too.

Monday, start of another week. Had a good weekend. Today will be a “field day”, hope the weather isn’t too bad.